Events on Friday, February 7th, 2014

Abstract: With the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, much of the attention in the particle physics community has turned to illuminating the true nature of dark matter. Out of the numerous possible scenarios studied in the literature, one interesting scenario involves the case where dark matter (much like the Higgs boson) has enhanced couplings to the most massive particles in the Standard Model (e.g., W and Z bosons, top quarks and/or the Higgs boson itself). In this talk, I will discuss one particular model where dark matter couples exclusively to the right-handed top quark (which we dub aEurooeTop portal dark matteraEuro or TPDM). In this situation, the possibility of detecting dark matter in direct-detection experiments such as LUX is highly suppressed and one must turn to other types of searches. I will present the results of a preliminary study on the feasibility of detecting TPDM either at the LHC or through indirect searches. In particular, I will show that this type of model has very interesting signatures in gamma rays.

Individual quanta of these fields are photons with energy a few million times smaller than the energy of an optical photon and are extremely hard to detect. A promising device for microwave photon detection is based on Josephson junctions. Even a single microwave photon with tiny energy is sufficient to switch a junction from the superconducting to voltage state, and detection of a photon reduces to observation of voltage pulses across the junction.

In this talk, I will present a theoretical model of a Josephson junction interacting with a quantized electromagnetic field and show that such Josephson photon detectors have relatively high efficiency of detection of microwave photons. I will discuss application of such detectors to qubit readout for quantum information processing and to studies of photon emission statistics by quantum electronic devices.